Please read the file LICENCE before using this software.

To re-iterate the manual page, span and its alter-ego despan "span"
data over and recover data from multiple removable block-special disk
devices such as floppy disks, Zip disks, and presumeably the Avatar
Shark drive, although I don't have one to test with.

It can run either by writing directly to the raw device, or by
on-the-fly mounting and unmounting a filesystem defined in
/etc/fstab. The filesystems on each disk do not need to be empty, nor
will existing files be disturbed (unless one of them has the same name
as the file span is writing to:-), but span will fill each filesystem
completely if it needs to. For full details, see "man span" after
installation.

WARNING: although I use span myself for backing up my system (since I
don't have a tape drive), please consider this to be ALPHA
software. It seems to work for me, but until I have reports from other
people and gain more confidence in its robustness, I'd rather you were
careful about how much you trust it. Naturally, since it is
distributed under the GPL, it comes with no warranty in any case, but
it would be remiss of me not to include this extra warning, lest the
GPL led you to believe that it was of the same quality as GNU software
:-)

Before installing, check the Makefile for appropriate values, in
particular if the mount and umount commands are not in your path,
change the MOUNTCMD and UMOUNTCMD variables to be the full paths. Then:

To build:
	make

To install:
	make install

To deinstall:
	make deinstall

By default, unless you edit it, the Makefile will install span and
despan (which is just a link to span) in /usr/local/bin and the manual
page in /usr/local/man/man8

Finally, you might find it useful to add the contents to span-magic to
the end of /etc/magic; this will allow span volumes to be identified
by the 'file' command (the fields printed will be format version,
volume name, blocksize, volume number, bytes on volume).

I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone who finds span and despan
useful, both to increase my confidence that it works okay (and boost
my ego:), and to get suggestions on how it could be improved.

PLEASE send bug and/or success reports to me at the address
below. Enjoy!

       Fraser McCrossan <fraserm@gtn.net>

$Id: README,v 1.3 1998/03/23 22:57:35 fraserm Exp $
$Log: README,v $
Revision 1.3  1998/03/23 22:57:35  fraserm
changed status messages
added getopt support for -q quiet and -l volume label options
more minor bugfixes

Revision 1.2  1998/03/22 20:38:11  fraserm
updates for filesystem stuff

Revision 1.1  1998/03/06 02:30:26  fraserm
Initial revision

